Welcome back to the final phase in your Teams Adoption! In this last phase we’ll be bringing everything you’ve learned thus far and apply it to support the broad scale enablement of Teams into your organization! In order to do this properly, you should follow these steps:
- Define outcomes and successes
- Optimize feedback and reporting
- Drive awareness and implement training
- Schedule service health reviews
With that said, let’s jump into our first step and start defining what success looks like and the outcomes we intend on achieving!
Define outcomes and successes
Just like with any goal, you need to have some type of expected outcome and a measurement that you can define success with. In order to scale appropriately for this deployment you’ll want to use the info that we’ve already gathered in previous phases and use this to apply and expand your success criteria. Although there isn’t one particular “right” way to do this, Microsoft has provided a recommended strategy for mapping this criteria. This is broken down into 4 categories:
- Organizational
- Cultural transformation
- Employee retention
- Talent acquisition
- Social engagement
- Operational agility
- Cultural
- Employee sentiment
- Employee recommendations
- Customer feedback
- Innovation measures (for example, idea forum contributions, hackathons, product innovation engagements)
- Tangible
- Customer experience impacts (faster service, reduction in service incidents, customer referral/loyalty program participation)
- Cost savings
- Revenue generation
- Data security
- Process simplification
- Retirement of legacy systems
- Individual
- Use of desired tools
- Employee morale
- Employee productivity
- Employee engagement
- Idea generation
Select a service enablement strategy
Within this same step you start to consider your service enablement strategy. There are 5 different supported strategies that Microsoft supports today:
- Teams First – Leading your deployment with Teams
- For new or low usage O365 users
- Teams Core – Leading your collaboration with Teams
- Enabling Teams alongside SharePoint and OneDrive
- Teams Go Big – All employees on Teams and organization-wide teams
- Best suited for customers with < 1000 users
- Enable cross organization collaboration with one team for all
- Skype Side by Side – Have Teams and Skype for Business working in tandem
- Use the Teams Core tactics (mentioned above) for collaboration and Skype for Business for enterprise calling, interop, and hybrid scenarios
- Migration – Migrating using from Skype for Business to Teams
- Plan your move from Skype for Business to Teams by creating a service strategy roadmap
For a full breakdown of these enablement strategies check out the documentation here.
As mentioned, these are only guidelines that Microsoft recommends for their customers and this isn’t guaranteed to be a one size fits all, so how you carry this out may vary.
Engage stakeholders
Very early on in the project you should define the appropriate rhythm and method for communicating with your stakeholders. This will allow you to clearly define your overall vision and end-goal for everyone in your organization. Just like with your service enablement strategy, your methods may vary slightly from the way Microsoft lays things out. With that said, you should decide what method would best serve to communicate to the various levels of engagement in your organization.
Expand your implementation team
Depending on the size of your implementation you may need a bigger team which will often mean many different roles. This could include (but is not limited to):
- Business sponsors
- IT support
- Training personnel
- Change management
- More champions
One big problem I have seen with customers in the past is that they are spread too thin, meaning they have too many roles assigned to each individual. When this happens the individual often gets overwhelmed with all of the roles they must handle that they are unable to fulfill these roles to its fullest potential. With that said, it is often recommended that you divvy out roles for different individuals so they have a clear goal that must be achieved. If the individual has the bandwidth they can definitely take on more than one role but be sure to emphasis the importance of each role so they can clearly understand that they’ll need to possess the technical, communication, and training skills necessary to implement a successful change project.
Expand your governance and information management policies
Once your enablement strategy is in place, it is time to focus on revisiting the concept of governance that you covered in phase 1. This will require that you backtrack and cover decisions 1 to 6 from the Governance quick start. For some examples of team level provisioning and management best practices, check out the official Microsoft documentation here.
Streamline business engagement
The last piece of defining your outcomes and success will be streamlining business engagements. For this to happen you will need to work closely with your business units to ensure you have a good grasp around what needs, opportunities, and difficulties they currently have. Microsoft has provided a great way to start this process by giving you steps that you should follow to streamline your work with business units:
- Meet with key influencers within a business unit before engaging the executive to gain insight and alignment.
- Understand their current solutions for common scenarios (email, SharePoint, Yammer, and other products).
- Start small by selecting scenarios that map to high impact, low/medium difficulty as you scale.
- Capture feedback and develop champions with business unit knowledge to support the transition.
- Set up monthly check points to discuss progress and prioritize the backlog of additional projects.
Optimize feedback and reporting
Great job! You’ve deployed Teams to the masses and now it is time to get the long awaited feedback from your customers to see how they like using Teams. Just like in your Experiment phase when you captured information about how people have used Teams and their experience, you’ll want to incorporate this same feedback method to improve on your awareness and training programs as you expand Teams for the masses. In addition, you’ll want to consider reviewing your service reporting as you deploy and adopt Microsoft Teams. There are 3 types of service reporting that you can use:
- Service Health – Located within the O365 tenant (Admin > Health > Service Health)
- Service Activity – Located within the O365 tenant (Admin > Reports > Usage)
- Service Satisfaction – Information gathered via community forums and surveys on user experience
Drive awareness and implement training for Microsoft Teams
Great now that you have the appropriate feedback and reporting you need, you can proceed by driving awareness and training so you can market Microsoft Teams to your users so you can ensure they are kept up to date with the latest capabilities released for Teams. Internal communications will be one of your biggest assets in the adoption of Teams. With that said, you should include the following:
- Internal awareness materials such as posters, digital signage and events.
- Self-help and training information in a single location.
In addition, you should follow these steps during your pilot phases to get the most out of Teams:
- Have a regular scheduled meeting with your project stakeholders for updates.
- Make self-help documentation available, including product videos.
- Hold a kick-off meeting with the pilot users to get them excited about their participation. The importance of creating a sense of community with enthusiasm can’t be overstated.
Once you have these steps down, you’ll be ready to apply these same steps to your entire organization. Since every company varies in size, this could take longer for larger organizations and might be implemented in phases rather than all at once. In addition, since not every user is the same you’re bound to have some that pick up Teams and like to learn how to use it by themselves whereas others might need some guidance and self-help information to get them started. With that said, since everyone learns in different ways and at different rates it is important to have some type of hub for information that your users can access to support all styles of learning within your organization. Microsoft provides a plethora of end-user training that I encourage you to check out. Some of the training resources include:
- Instructor-led end-user training for Teams
- Administrator training for Teams
- Online End-user training
- Coffee in the Cloud online training for champions & IT pros
- Day in the Life Office 365 training cheat sheets
Measure and share your success
Since you’ve put in all the hard work to ensure the success of Teams, you should have also clearly defined how you measure the success of this project. From the inception of this project you should have set a goal. Each goal that you set should be measurable, so you should have certain criteria that must be met to classify your project as “successful”. In order to do this, you should consider the following:
- Active users in the product
- Views of your information webpages
- Questions in your user community
- Views of your training videos
- Attendance at learning events
You should also be open to sharing the feedback of your customers on your intranet. A common hashtag (for all you hip people out there) used is #TeamsStories, where others can share their experience with Teams and you can highlight what Teams can bring to the table so others will be more likely to embrace change in your environment.
Schedule service health reviews
The last step in your Teams adoption journey will include scheduling a monthly service health review for Teams. Microsoft suggests that you share insights on the following measures:
- Service usage – Active usage data, and may include information about services deprecated or consumption reduced as a result of moving to Teams. Typically led by service manager or product owner for collaboration services.
- Service health – Call quality, meeting health and overall service health. Review of any support incidents and helpdesk ticket levels. Security and governance topics. Typically led by information protection and support teams.
- Capability/project roadmap – What is the schedule of remaining employee onboarding or further collaboration improvement projects? What additional features is your organization going to enable? Typically led by service manager or product owner for collaboration services in collaboration with key business stakeholders.
- Awareness campaign and training success measure update – Includes reach, participation, key feedback themes, and open issues. Include key wins and success stories.
This monthly review can prove to be very useful in wrapping up your Teams adoption so you can ensure those using Teams are working in a healthy, happy, and productive environment. In addition, you can use these measurements to highlight the adoption rates that your users embrace Teams, and start setting new goals for new capabilities that you can leverage Teams in your environment. As a reminder, Teams is constantly changing and adding new capabilities and functionality every month, so something that isn’t available today may be available next year/month/day depending on the demand for that specific feature. Microsoft is constantly listening to feedback and I encourage you to leverage their feedback channel and vote on new features that you want in Teams. This concludes the blog series on the Teams adoption hub deep dive. I hope you have found this helpful and I encourage you to check out some of my other blogs, as I regularly post about Skype for Business and Teams!
